Feature Image: The Okanagan Nation Alliance’s work over the past 30 years to successfully return sockeye, and now chinook, to the Okanagan system of the Columbia River, provides valuable learning and inspiration for the Bringing the Salmon Home Initiative’s reintroduction work (Oct. 19, 2021). Photo by Bringing the Salmon Home Initiative.
BC First Nations call for sustaining Columbia River salmon reintroduction funding
The Syilx Okanagan, Secwépemc, and Ktunaxa Nations are calling on the federal and provincial governments to commit to sustaining funding to ensure salmon return to the upper Columbia River in B.C. The Columbia River was once the source of the greatest salmon runs in the world. Millions of lifegiving sockeye and giant chinook swam upriver to spawn each year.
But massive dams, beginning with Grand Coulee in Washington State, have blocked salmon from returning to the Columbia River’s Canadian headwaters for almost a century. Forty percent of the Columbia’s total 2,000-kilometre length originates in British Columbia.
The hydroelectric power created by the dams lit up the west and made governments and utility companies rich on both sides of the border. The ongoing losses to Indigenous Nations, Tribes, and the entire Pacific salmon ecosystem are immense.
After years of negotiation to modernize the transboundary Columbia River Treaty, an agreement-in-principle was announced July 11, 2024. Now it’s time to act on salmon reintroduction commitments.
Bringing the Salmon Home: The Columbia River Salmon Reintroduction Initiative, established in 2019, continues the longstanding collaborative work of the three Nations to bring salmon back to the upper Columbia.
“This is a continuation of our work through the decades, along with U.S. Tribes, in a One River, One Voice cultural process,” says Bringing the Salmon Home Executive Working Group Chair Mark Thomas, of the Secwepemc Nation. “It is our sacred responsibility.”
The U.S. government recently committed to contribute over $1.2 Billion over the next 20 years to Tribal-led salmon reintroduction on the American side of the Columbia River. However, government funding for the Bringing the Salmon Home Initiative in Canada runs out in March 2025.
“We have the track record, and the technology is available to deliver fish passage both down and upriver. Through our combined efforts, salmon are swimming today in the upper Columbia system in B.C. But it will take more than project funding that lasts just the single lifecycle of a salmon,” emphasizes kalʔlùpaɋʹn Chief Keith Crow, Executive Working Group representative, Syilx Okanagan Nation.
“We call on B.C. and Canada to provide the Bringing the Salmon Home Initiative with the sustaining core funding required to support our Indigenous-led salmon reintroduction work for a minimum of 20-years, in parallel with U.S. Tribal-led salmon reintroduction programs,” says Jason Andrew, Executive Working Group representative, Ktunaxa Nation.
